Saleha (EAL)

Annotated samples of a child's writing, demonstrating how her independent phonic knowledge and skills are applied. Saleha learns English as an additional language (EAL), her first language is Urdu. These samples show her writing progression through Year 2.

Year 2

In Year 1 she made significant progress with her acquisition of the English language which was also enhanced through the language-rich opportunities within the schools and her daily systematic synthetic phonics teaching. The samples initially show Phase Four application with the accurate spelling of consonant–vowel–consonant–consonant (CVCC) word 'hand' and phonemically plausible attempts at more complex words, for example 'bricks' shown as 'brics', 'water' shown as 'woter' and 'spider' shown as 'spaider'. As her phonics acquisition progresses, she starts to use more advanced high-frequency words such as 'make' and 'because', and writes all graphemes in consonant–vowel–consonant–consonant (CVCC) words, for example 'from'. Saleha shows that she uses both 'igh' and the alternative phase five 'y' in her writing as shown in the accurate spelling of words such as 'fight', 'fly' and 'cry'. There is also evidence that she spells Phase Five tricky words accurately, for example 'people' and 'don’t'. Beyond this, the samples show her applying her knowledge of the 'ing' suffix shown in the words 'getting' and 'ed' in the word 'scored'.